“I just figure all women are feminists unless they really hate themselves.” This statement issues from Sue Williams, in a recent interview with fellow artist Nate Lowman, as she accounts for shifts over the past twenty years in both her practice and its context. If Williams—who has all too easily and often been roped into simplified narratives around identity politics and, more specifically, traumatic power dynamics and violent corporeality as played out in sexualized representation—states with ease her belief that feminism can be aligned with self-respect, the real gravity of such a view is perhaps much heavier than it initially seems.

Indeed, Williams’s multivalent practice, while consistently legible as a project both political and formal (and vitally so), has also tended to act as a moving target, held up over the years to exemplify the more unseemly aspects of the battle between the